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Topic: My third try at Neapolitan (Read 1603 times)

So I've been trying to make some good Neapolitan style pizzaI've fairly happy with the results, consituring the fact that I'm using a home oven that only gets up to 500.I do have Caputo pizzeria flour.With this attempt I tryed a 61% hidration, which I thought was very hard to handle and to shape the pies.I did a 18 hour bulk at room tempthen about 10 hour ball at room tempthen 8 hour refrigerator tempand another 6 hour room tempI usually don't do all that but it was a hectic day and didn't have time to fire up the piesSo my overall disappointment was that the dough was to hard to handle and that the crust still comes out to dry and crispy, but i think that is due to the house oven and being cooked to long.Anyway here are some photos..one is a Margarita and the other is sausage and porccini mushrooms.

And how long did you cook it. Making decent tasting Neapolitan at 500 is essentially impossible. I'd either focus on hacking your oven or switch to the NY style recipes that incorporate oil and the like.

I made a great batch of dough the other day yielding fantastic pizzas when cooked at 850 for 2 mins. Puffed and airy interior with meltaway, paper-thin exterior. On a lark I tried cooking a pizza from the exact same batch at 500 for 4 mins. Chewy, flat, dense interior and crunchy, thick exterior. Just awful.

I think your low temperature problem will overwhelm and mask any other improvements to your technique.

The recipe I used was the following:100% Caputo pizzeria flour----400g61% water3% salt.08% yeast (Cold compact brick)

I combined the warm tap water with the yeast.Then I slowly combined flour. I used my hands to mix..I mixed for about 5 min I took a break and i added saltthen i started mixing again for another 6 min and had to take another break ( who would of known making pizza was a work out, what I do now is mix my dough before i go to the gym, its a great warm up)I took about a 5 min break and i did a finall knead of about 6 min.Then like I said before i covered the bowl and let it sit at room temp for about 18hours or morethen i formed the balls and let those sit for another 10 hours at room tempthen i placed them in the refrigerator over night and took them out at room temp for about 6 hours before I shaped them. Which was hard since the dough was at a high hidration.very sticky and soft i had to recover many holes.I have quarry stones that I preheated and left at the bottom shelf of my oven for over 2 hours and 500then i cooked the pies for about 4 min. and put them under the broiler for about 20 secs.

I made three pizzas and one deep fried calzonei tryed to open up the pizzas to about 11 inches but one was bigger than the otherhowever i split the pizza balls two were 250 grams, 0ne was 200 and the other was 150 which i used for the fried calzone.. (which was very good even though the oil should of been at a higher temp. my girlfriend threw it in when it was at 225 so it socked up oil and got a hole but then i turned the oil to 375.

It will be very difficult to comment on your use of the cake yeast over a period of 34 hours, a good part of which was at (unspecified) room temperature and a part in the refrigerator. In the U.S. the amount of cake yeast you used would be minuscule--equal to about 2/100 of a 17-gram (0.6 oz.) package as sold in some supermarkets. Also, you used a lot of salt, which itself slows down the fermentation process and may impair enzyme performance. Further, unless you maintained a fairly constant temperature during the fermentation/ripening of the dough, the varying temperatures could have affected the results. Making small quantities of dough using very small amounts of yeast comes with some peril (large dough masses perform differently than smaller, scaled down masses).

In your case, I think I would at least double the amount of yeast you have been using and stay with room temperature fermentation only. And I think I would target a shorter fermentation period, possibly 8-12 hours in bulk, and a few hours thereafter. Also, unless it is hot where you live, I would reduce the amount of salt to about 2%. Finally, I would reduce the hydration a few percent, to about 58%, which is close to the rated absorption rate for the Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour. When using the higher hydration, there is the tendency to bake the pizza too long in order to get a nice coloration in the crust. But, often the result of doing this is to produce a crust that is hard and cracker-like. I would also use 250 gram dough balls and a 10” size (about 25 cm.). In a future effort, you may also want to add some oil to the dough. But you might want to wait to see if that becomes necessary or useful.

I can’t guarantee that the above changes will vastly improve your results, but the dough formulation reflecting those changes will look like this: